Thoughts on online and in-person consultations

For the past ten years or so, I have been consulting online with a variety of people around the world. Presently, as a Church Service Missionary, I serve at the BYU Library Family History Center where we have a Virtual Help Desk. 

https://familyhistory.lib.byu.edu/get-help

Over the years, I have volunteered to help with a variety of genealogical topics, but because I speak Spanish fluently, many of my consultations both online and in person are Spanish speaking and mostly are immigration questions and most come from Latin America. This has been true for the past twenty years especially when I was living in Arizona. 

One thing I have learned is there is an overwhelming interest in obtaining dual-citizenship for either Spain or Italy. The main challenge being a lack of knowledge of the place of origin of the immigrant. I have developed a “standard” response even though the response is not very promising. The answer for all immigrant questions is that research for an immigrant begins in the country of arrival, not the country of departure. 

The second issue that has become clear is that those coming online from Latin America are usually more computer and smartphone literate than those people coming on from the United States. Another lesson, was that a very high percentage of all the requests came from people using a smartphone as their main contact device. 

Another very interesting and challenging issue was that I learned that many (most) of the Latin American records on the FamilySearch.org website are restricted to viewing in a FamilySearch Center. This was true mainly in South America. I have also learned that Spanish language records, depending on the country, can be hard to find online and I end up telling people to contact the Catholic church directly or also, to directly contact civil registration offices. 

I also experienced a basic fact that all the people who were interested enough to come online were very friendly and thankful for the help. I have had hundreds, (perhaps thousands) of special experiences talking to people all over the world. It is probably a good idea to note here that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world after Chinese. 

My next learning experience has been how limited the genealogically valuable records are in almost all the Spanish speaking countries of the world. There are only two main categories of records: church records and civil registration records. It was also interesting to learn that FamilySearch.org has almost no civil registration records from Argentina. 

The majority of people needing help ultimately come from Latin America with a few from Spain and Italy. I should probably note that I do not speak Portuguese so I haven't helped much with inquiries about Brazil or Portugal. 

I guess another interesting observation is that the lack of awareness of record sources for genealogical research is about the same no matter the language spoken although English speaking patrons are more likely to have a developed a family tree online. 

I have also learned a lot about genealogical records in every Latin American country as well as in Spain and Italy. 

AI turned out to be extremely helpful in identifying Catholic parishes and diocese.

The experience of one-on-one consultations has been priceless.